IF SPACE ALIENS land on earth, they’ll want souvenirs. I say we give them Berkeley.

From politics to those inane street barricades, it’s already in another world. Now Berkeley is spacing out again. It’s got a cupcake truck. Time to cue the theme music from “Twilight Zone.”

An entrepreneurial baker is driving around town selling cupcakes from a converted postal van. Even by Berkeley standards this is goofy.

For starters, postal vans smell bad — all those magazine deodorant ads. Then there’s the market miscalculation. Berkeley is more of a brownie town, if you get my drift. Finally, there’s the whole notion of mobilizing pastry. Trucks are for cement, not baked goods.

But leave it to Berkeley. The cupcake wave crested in Manhattan in the last decade. Too late to get in on the initial fad, The People’s Republic is now trying to catch up.

And if it can’t — no problem. They’ll invent something else. How does policemen on skateboards sound?

Nothing against Berkeley. In another galaxy far, far away, it would be a fine place. But when it comes to cupcake trucks, I’m dubious.

I blame the cupcakes. Historians say cupcakes were invented more than 150 years ago. That makes them the second worst thing to come out of the 19th century, after only the Civil War.

To be sure, cake is good. It’s so good, in fact, that I never understood why those French peasants beheaded Marie Antoinette. After all, she wanted them to eat cake. And life can’t be bad when you’re eating cake.

But there must be a lot of cake. A little cake is not satisfying.

A wise man once said, “Order a piece of cake and you won’t be happy. Ask for a boxcar of it and you’ll know contentment.”

See the problem? Cupcakes aren’t big enough to satisfy. They’re like movie previews. They look great but give you only about 10 percent of what you came for.

But now there are two Orinda businessmen trying to prove me wrong. I hope they succeed.

Peter McNiff and Chih-Chung Fang have opened the Republic of Cake in the Orinda Theatre Square. They sell cupcakes. That’s it.

For 85 cents up to $2.75, you could select from a dozen choices. One is vanilla. Another is Pumpkin Thai Curry.

If that last item sounds like soup in a Berkeley restaurant, it’s not surprising. The partners wanted to open their cupcake bakery in Berkeley. But the Post Office was out of trucks.

So they picked a glass-paneled storefront behind Orinda Theatre instead. “Orinda doesn’t have a bakery and the market in Orinda is huge,” explained McNiff, who serves as general manager.

Chih, the cupcake chef, is a molecular biology graduate from UC Berkeley. He learned how to bake at Chez Panisse. He’s betting that Orinda will also prefer cupcakes to molecules.